~I don't know about you, but I'm super-excited for this chapter! I'll let you see why...
Thanks to all who have been following and/or reviewing. You guys are great! :D~
The giant hands approach the beach dramatically slowly – but nowhere near slowly enough – the shadows they cast narrowing, tightening as they descend.
As it is wont to do in these situations, Drakken's adrenaline turns on him, glassing him off from the rest of the world, in a little chamber rapidly filling up with the fumes of his own panic, able to watch the outcome but not affect it. Only when a flower rubs its velvety-pedaled self against his face do Drakken's nerve endings reawaken in a sharp, sudden jolt, his feet beginning to churn before they've even returned to the ground. His vision mottled, he nevertheless manages to find two handfuls of Sadie's blouse and give her a shove.
"Sadie, do me a favor and run for your life!" Drakken orders her, because she spoke to him kindly and because her eyes softened so when she heard Lapis's name, and because he doesn't want anyone else to get hurt. With the possible exception of Bismuth, who is also shooing the macaroni-haired family away, yelling at the humans to run, and who would look almost heroic in her wide-legged stance if he didn't know what she did to Lapis. And Steven.
The music falls away as Greg lowers his guitar to his side, blanching even through his sunburn. Next to him, tears gush down Steven's cheeks, which strikes Drakken as a tad premature, given that nothing has even happened yet. A quick glance around reveals Sadie and most of the other humans to have vacated the premises, so Drakken dashes over to stand beside father and son.
"Is it..is it…is it..?" is as far as Drakken can get. After that, his tongue becomes dead weight in his mouth, a dense atomic mass impossible to move.
"Yeah." Steven wipes his eyes on his tuxedo sleeve, shiny-black even in the unnatural darkness. "It's them."
Them. The Diamonds, the women who rule Homeworld. Who are supposedly vastly enormous. Who frightened away the bravest, strongest woman he knows.
Lapis was right. They're coming.
A pungent sort of tenacity that Drakken recognizes all too well from his years of supervillainy buries itself in his soul, refusing to let go. His senses laser to a single, specific awareness – they chased off his girlfriend, and now they think they're going to come demolish the planet he has pledged his life to defend?
I believe the term is "Nuh-UH!"
"Why are they coming here? Now?" Drakken bursts out. That's much easier to say, lubricated by fury.
"I think they came to get the Cluster," Steven says.
Drakken blinks at him. "The wha?"
"The Cluster. A superweapon comprised of thousands and thousands of shattered Gem shards, left to incubate near the center of the Earth for thousands of years. Once the Cluster awakens, it will expand to a size several times larger than the planet, thus eradicating it and bringing even more power to the Diamonds."
The explanation trembles through somebody's nose. Drakken turns around to see Peridot, clutching her now-empty flower basket in one hand, goggling up at the Diamonds' ships, the picture of innocence and defenselessness in the muffled light, still wearing her sunny little dress. But Drakken knows the sound of science when he hears it, and for a moment it makes the atmosphere breathable again.
"Fascinating!" Drakken says. "So who controls this Cluster? Is there some sort of hive mind technology going on? Or does it receive its orders directly from the Diamonds? Because hive minds are extremely time-saving and relatively efficient, but they can also be fairly easy to negate if your enemy is smart eno –"
He is interrupted (he would say "rudely," but he doesn't especially care to remember the Bebes, anyway) by Pearl. Her skinny white hand clutches a skinny white spear to match her skinny white everything-else. "Dr. Drakken, I would love to answer all your questions…at a later date," she says.
She doesn't add "If there is a later date, if we survive this," but it's still there, dangling in the air, almost tangible.
A knot jerks tight in Drakken's belly. It has just now occurred to him that this could be it, the mission he doesn't come back from, and his bravery curdles, souring the taste at the back of his throat. He's not afraid of going to heaven, but he'd rather go in a way that isn't directly preceded by gruesome pain.
Pearl drags the heel of her – ballet-flat is all Drakken can think to call it – across the sand and glances to Garnet and Amethyst with raised eyebrows. They nod in return, and all three of them (well, technically all four of them) begin to circle in place, perfectly synchronized, like three layers of a lock that must all have the combination spun onto them at the exact same time for it to click open. At the end of a full rotation, their hands extend to the center and latch onto one another. The day's second explosion of bright-white light shoots up from the beach like a mushroom cloud.
The creature left standing when the dust settles is fuchsia – which, now that Drakken thinks about it, is the perfect color for a fusion. Her forehead is high beneath wild waves of seaweed-colored hair and above an opaque pair of sunglasses that find the last wan bits of sunlight and bounce them off like beacons. Drakken loses count of her limbs as she sweeps Steven behind her and swings for the Diamonds' ship, and then – and then –
And then her mouth opens. And then her whole face comes open, as if on a hinge, revealing a second mouth, which also unhinges to bare lamprey fangs and a tongue that would make a chameleon turn green(er) with envy.
It is then that Drakken shrieks and jumps back, even though he knows all three of the Gems (well, technically all four of the Gems) in this fusion to be kind and lovely people.
Behind him, a much shriller shriek rises, and Drakken turns back to see Peridot, scooped up and disappearing into Bismuth's big gray arms. She squirms and flails the way Commodore Puddles always does when he somehow knows he's being taken to the vet and not just on a fun car ride. Determination, maybe even protectiveness, clenches Bismuth's jaw, not anger. "Put me down, you cl –" Peridot begins.
Even though it feels like giving himself a root canal without anesthesia, Drakken raises a hand to her. "Peridot, there isn't time to hold a grudge right now! Let her help you!"
Because whatever else happens, he can't watch his girlfriend's little sister be trampled into the ground.
Peridot's eyes meet Drakken's across the beach with such utter trust that Drakken almost forgets how to breathe. She stops fighting. Bismuth hoists her to a more comfortable-looking position and throws a weed-whacking glare back at the ships.
The blue ship reaches the ground first. Under ordinary circumstances, Drakken would rejoice in anything blue winning anything, but right now his knees are bouncing off each other, the two pieces of wedding cake he ate beginning to act up. Especially considering the ship doesn't do anything once it lands. It just rests there, waiting. Watching, Drakken might even say, if the ship had eyes to go with its fingers.
On the other hand, the…well, the other hand doesn't land at all. It angles itself into a goldenrod lightning bolt so that its fingers are tilted toward the mound of hard earth beyond the beach, and it plunges them in, crushing through crust and mantle, through grass and rock and magma as if they are nothing more than a bother…ance to her.
"What is it doing?" This from the only other human remaining in the general vicinity, a girl with skin the shade of brownie batter and a juvenile version of Shego's hair. Drakken gets the feeling he knows her, too, from Lapis's stories and he tries to place her, but his thoughts are so scattered and skittish he might as well try to catch mice in his bare hands.
"The Cluster!" Steven grabs the sides of his head. "She's trying to get to the Cluster! She doesn't know we bubbled them – that they're on our side now! I have to warn them!"
His voice quivers under the weight of trying to hold everyone, including this mysterious Cluster, together. Drakken himself feels like a paperback book on a shelf with too few other books and no bookend, that at any moment he will collapse into the empty space and take all his friends down with him.
(Ooh – poetic! But now's not the time to admire his use of symbolism.)
"I know!" Steven says with a snap of his fingers. "I was able to talk to the Cluster before when I passed out. Maybe I'll be able to talk to them again if I can –"
"Go to sleep?" the girl suggests – thankfully before Bismuth can offer to knock him out.
"Exactly!" Steven says.
"Sleep?" Drakken doesn't mean to holler the word, especially not in an overture of doubt. It's just that – it's just that – it's just that how can anyone possibly expect to sleep while a giant, metal, extraterrestrial hand rips through chunks of earth like they're so much Jell-O?
Steven shows no signs of being offended. He bobs the curls three or four times, and then he leaves sand in his wake as he bolts for his house. Drakken follows him, Greg, and the girl inside – mostly because Bismuth has parked herself on the corner of the porch, hands on her hips, and an expression stamped on that clearly reads, Just try it, punks!
The four of them crowd into Steven's room, which turns out to be perched just above the living room, separated by a stumpy flight of stairs and a floor-slash-ceiling but no walls. Steven flings himself back-down on a mattress the texture of a finely toasted marshmallow. His arms snap to his sides. It is not a relaxed posture – it is a posture that brings to mind some poor soul preparing for a full physical exam at their doctor's office.
Sure enough, within two seconds, Steven has stirred, looking as close to grouchy as Drakken has ever seen him. "This isn't gonna work," he says. "Not like this. Dad – can you play me a lullaby?"
Drakken taps his fingertips together. Works on not hyperventilating. Wishes Shego were here.
"Sure thing, Schtewball," Greg says. He hangs his guitar around his neck again and lilts a hand across the strings. "Hush, little baby –"
Immediately, Steven's eyes are closed, twitching beneath his lids. A stream of drool seeps from between his lips, and one of his feet traces a half-circle on the thick blanket beneath him. The girl lifts a hand to hide a smile, a smile both appreciative and bracing, as though she is leaving the last rest station in a fifty-mile radius.
A-ha! She must be Connie, the one who Lapis and Peridot couldn't agree was Steven's girlfriend or not. Good job, Drakken.
Before he has even finished congratulating his genius, the air pressure swells and then snaps with a shifting seismic noise, the kind Drakken remembers all too well from his failed Drakkengenea scheme. (He invited the continents to a family reunion, but forgot to factor in those familial squabbles known as earthquakes. Honest mistake.)
Steven shoots up out of bed as if he's been shot with espresso and runs out the front door, followed by Greg and Probably-Connie. Drakken's in no mood to be left behind, so he jogs after them, vines bouncing against his ponytail with every step.
Outside is – oh boy.
Outside, the mound of earth has split in two, land peeled back on either side of a gaping cavity. From the depths – yes, from the actual depths! – rises a strong, fierce-looking arm. Coils of sinew wrap it from wrist to fingers, blue and red bleeding into purple and then back out into themselves, raw and tense yet somehow beautiful.
But also – this is a superweapon. Created from broken people. The thought burns like liquid fire in Drakken's brain.
The arm-that-must-belong-to-the-Cluster stretches and then clamps around the yellow hand-ship, the thumbs locking together in opposition. As Drakken bounces from foot to foot, the Cluster-arm begins to twist the yellow hand sideways, trying to wrench it down and pin it.
(This is the coolest thing he's seen in months!)
The yellow hand is stunned for only a few moments before it begins to fight back, metal crunching as the fingers clench, searching for a good hold. Drakken abruptly sees the Cluster-arm as his cousin Eddy's, a wall immovable even by the other strong guys in prison. It's no trouble at all to picture a head to go along with the hand-ship – a head with veins heaving at the temples because it can't win.
It can't win.
Although it does hang on for several nail-biting minutes, in the end it cannot regain those first few moments it lost to the element of surprise. The Cluster-arm flips it upside-down and definitively slams it to the dirt. In a marvelous ruckus of broken glass and torn-out circuitry, the yellow hand hits and folds, important pieces of itself turned to debris that rain uselessly down beside its wrecked husk.
"In the words of a very dear friend of mine – Boo-yah!" Drakken yells.
"Thanks, Cluster!" Steven adds. "You're the best!"
The sinewy arm turns to Steven and gives him a thumbs-up that makes it look significantly less dark and tortured. Its slide back into the ground is punctuated with a pink flash, and the Earth no longer shakes.
At that point, Drakken is sure he hears thunder from four, five miles away – quiet and indistinct, yet rife with the promise of hailstones and forty-mile-per-hour wind gusts. Except the thunder is saying, "Enough!" as it rumbles, and the back of the blue hand-ship glides open. A skyscraper-tall figure emerges, shrouded in blue darker than Drakken's own cobalt lab coat. She takes one step forward, then another, the ground startled back into quakes with her every footfall.
"Ho geez," Greg whispers.
The cowl lifts. She turns, and Drakken's next breath catches in his chest. Her blue eyes are as huge as the rest of her, and in them he sees a sadness, an anger, a gentleness, and a ferocity all at once – if he didn't have the knowledge he possesses of how Gem biology works (and doesn't work), he would swear she was Lapis's mother. Thick white tears shimmer against her skin, coursing downward in waterfalls.
Drakken can't tear his gaze away from the woman. He feels himself pulsing with gratitude and resentment and this certain type of longing – the type he experienced as a fifth-grader with a broken wrist, watching the other kids scale the jungle gym and ride their bikes. And he knows who she is.
Knows it long before Steven breathes, tinged with dread, "Blue Diamond."
You recline beside Kanatar's ice-glazed ocean, one hand resting on its solid, prismatic surface. Many of the Kanatar have invited you to join them in various activities, even today, yet your brain locked down, cold and flat, whenever you even considered doing so. Only with the ocean are no words required.
Before you, a group of juvenile Kanatar hit an ice ball back and forth, their frosted skin a more accurate measure of time than the planet's position by the sun, which is skewed, orbit akimbo compared to Earth's or Homeworld's. Two different groups of players stand, one on either side of a fissure in the ground, and toss the ball over it, the objective to never let the ball touch the ground. Whichever group misses it and lets it fall receives a point in one of those games played in reverse, where you win by scoring as few points as you can. Steven and Peridot played a similar game back on Earth with a sphere only slightly less white and less hard, and you remember hearing their tiny grunts as they smacked the ball from where you sat with your back against a rock, reading a book.
In the wake of their rippled laughing, you are more aware than ever of your silence, of the stillness within you. You are a pond, stagnant, while all the living creatures on Earth are rivers, gurgling and churning unfailingly with the constant motion of what Dr. Drakken has informed you are known as "cells" – the tiniest pieces of their bodies.
A chilled breeze drones past, molding your skirt to your legs. Not a grain of stony sand rustles. Far in the distance, the quarries are alive with Kanatar going about their day, metal ringing against metal.
You don't know how long you sit there, watching the Kanatar play and listening to them work, when the unexpected happens: Something deep inside the center of your gem reaches out to touch the outer corners – and the rest of you beyond them – grabs hold of them, and tugs them back itself, your entire essence compressing around a single, declarative vibration that shivers across your back. It is the same energy that reached out to find you when you were underwater, shut into Malachite; it was the only pleasant sensation you experienced as her. Though it is stronger now and more powerful, you would know it anywhere, the perfect fusion of cells and facets with no clear demarcation between them.
It is your friend Steven, groaning. You pause your breathing in order to hear him better.
This time, he does not say your name. He cries, instead, Cluster!
Your feet clench in the rocklike sand. He is speaking to the Cluster, the weapon the Diamonds crafted from the shards of war victims. It was contacted and bubbled the same day Malachite collapsed and, hidden near the core of the planet, was no longer a danger. If he is attempting to communicate with it now, it can only mean one thing.
Cluster, I need your help! Steven's transmission wavers. The Diamonds are here, and they're here for you! They want to wake you up and use you to destroy Earth! Please, please, please don't let them do that!
You shoot your consciousness out toward Steven's, but it has already pulled away.
When you close your eyes, though, the words reverberate in the darkness, intended for the Cluster yet clear as one of your own reflections, as clear as anything has ever been to you. Steven needs your help. Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl need your help. Drakken, Peridot, and Pumpkin need your help.
The slab of ocean beneath your palm begins to thaw.
A peculiar, brittle laughter escapes through your clamped lips, the laughter of a marooned sailor upon spotting a passing ship. You thought your cowardice was confirmed the day you decided to leave Earth rather than stay and fight for those you love. But that day has come and gone, and it is of no more importance than this game of keeping the ice ball off the ground. The dilemma that determines your character is the one immediately set before you, and you have the power to make the choice, right here and right now.
You stare down at your fingerprints, gazing at an identity that knew you long before you knew it. In an instant, your world tilts, and as though you are again reentering a life of sensations after your imprisonment in the mirror, you feel everything – fear and love and doubt and hope, anger and sadness and determination, all in a cascade down your back, in a binding around your soul. It clutches you and threatens to pull you under, yet you tighten your jaw and rise, first to your feet and then to your wings.
The warp pad is not a far flight, positioned behind one of the larger mines. You land and tap one of the Kanatar miners on the elbow. He swivels a bulky frame around to face you, and you say into his soft yellow eyes, "Give the High Emperor my thanks for his kindness. But I gotta go. My friends need me."
He nods at you, and you flit over to the warp pad. It hums beneath you, like one of those moving chairs Dr. Drakken uses to soothe his human aches, as it accepts your presence. As you raise your arms and allow the surging current to push you upward, you fill yourself with a single word, one that ricochets off the lines of your gemstone and spreads ever farther into your being until there is not a single part of you left untouched:
Home.
Kanatar disappears. The purple void of space takes its place as the current tumbles, twists, and transports the slant of light that creates your body. You touch down and the walls of matter disappear on either side of you. Above you, birds sing.
Stepping lightly off the warp pad, your bare toes come down on something soft, something you had nearly forgotten until now, whispering against your feet again. The Earth's grass, browned and crunching when you left, has been fluffed and revitalized, greener than Peridot and smoother than Dr. Drakken's lab coat.
Your wings carry you toward the structure that sits serenely before you in peeling, faded red. Thoughts race through you – of the baseball bat with which you almost smashed Peridot's tablet, or the broom Peridot has used to fight off black-masked furry creatures who occasionally wandered into the barn, hoping for food neither of you had.
By then you are directly in front of the barn. Its two doors hang wide open, just as they always have, as though they were waiting with patient anticipation for your return.
You allow yourself to giggle out loud, and in the next Earth-second, you are arcing your arms, stretching them as widely as Drakken has ever stretched his. At your earnest request, the smaller-than-average lake floats free of its borders, up to you, and fans out into the shape of an open book. You slip it under the entirety of the barn.
Steven's urgency presses fresh and sharp against your spine. There is no time to search for weapons. You thrust the water into the sky, propelling the barn with it. Higher and higher you climb, keeping pace with your wings alone, arms poised to hold the water in place, and you refuse to stop until you come to Steven's beach.
You are a Crystal Gem.
"Yes, I know several hostile alien crafts have been spotted within the Earth's atmosphere," Drakken snaps into his phone. "They're right here, and I'm looking at them!" He doesn't mean to yell at Dr. Director, but he's lost the ability to not yell, just as he's lost the ability to not sprout yellow petals, so now he is standing here, a screaming little flower straight out of a children's television program.
"My apologies for our tardiness, Dr. Drakken." Dr. Director's voice is as calm and stern as ever, no hint of the seismic disturbance going on all around him. "This technology is far more advanced than that of the Lorwardians. Our instruments could not detect them until they had penetrated the stratosphere."
"Cloaking devices. That's…that's good, right?" Drakken says, almost wincing at the shrillness that whistles out of him like steam. "It means they're focused on subterfuge, not brutality, right? Right?"
Dr. Director pauses. Uh-oh. Pausing is bad. "It could be. Agents will be dispatched to Beach City as soon as remotely feasible. I'll contact you with any additional information we receive."
"Unless the world is destroyed by aliens!" As hard as Drakken tries to grumble the words, they shake the way the rest of him does.
Dr. Director's voice grows sterner. "I'll not hear that kind of talk, Mr. Lipsky. The Earth is still here, and so are you. Go out there and show them what we're made of. I will speak to you later."
Hoo-boy.
A click and then she's gone. Probably for the best. He's only "Mr. Lipsky" when he's in trouble-with-a-capital-T. Drakken snaps his phone shut and barely manages to tremble it back into his pocket. He wonders if everyone feels the stress the way he does, gadding about inside his chest, fizzing and bubbling, soda-popping and coffee-scalding, simulating both carbonation and caffeine. Several words form in his brain, words he learned in prison, but they're not coming out. Not with Steven and Peridot both on the porch with him, staring upward in terrified innocence.
Across from Drakken, Greg runs a hand across his marble-shiny scalp, the ruddiness looking more sickly than painful now. Steven, equally pale, has his fists folded around two of the porch railing's support beams, his forehead smacked between them. The very air around Drakken seems to stab him in icicles, and how can that be when it's so warm out here?
It's Connie who moves. She swipes her backpack off and sets it on the ground, makes a remarkably un-trembly search through it, before coming back with a…sword? The one patch of light in the dimness reaches down and glints off its blade, highlighting every shade of pink one can imagine and an even-richer handle that appears to have been dunked in grape juice and left to sit overnight.
Wait – back up – this child has a sword? How are her parents okay with this?
With a sigh more visible than audible, Connie jumps onto the porch railing and, from there, springs straight upward into Blue Diamond's vicinity. The sword swings around, its color muddying as Connie hurls herself toward the mountain cloaked in blue. Though that leap would undoubtedly clear all hurdles in that blasted National Fitness Exam in elementary school, she will be lucky to clear Blue Diamond's waist.
And she isn't lucky.
Blue Diamond jerks her head in Connie's direction and the hood wrenches back, releasing a tidal wave of blue-white hair. Wrath prowls over her regal face, destroying all resemblance to his girlfriend, which Drakken would see as a good thing except that he knows from experience what it means when giant alien women glower at you that way, and it's enough to evaporate all moisture from your mouth while the rest of your pores go gushy with fear.
"I know that sword!" Blue Diamond exclaims. The thunder rips open, so cool and menacing that the tiny little Drakken-villain still living inside him momentarily envies her. "That's the sword that shattered her!" she says with conviction.
Every bit as if it's true, when it's not. And Drakken has heard enough ugly-wrong things for one day – he cannot let this one go unchallenged.
He does his best imitation of a game show "wrong-answer" buzzer. Both it and Drakken's cry of, "No, it isn't!" are grabbed by the wind and ushered away, over to the wreckage of the yellow ship, smoldering like the aftermath of a grease fire.
Blue Diamond's arm rises. Her fingers, each of which save for the thumb are easily a yardstick long, lock around the sword from all directions, while Connie still hangs from the hilt – is that what it's called, a "hilt," and who even cares right now? Blue Diamond tightens her wrist. Drakken's ears are assaulted with the noise of very-large fingernails down a ceramic plate. For a moment, the scene before him is blotted out by footage of a Diablo, crushing half a skyscraper underfoot with the same noise, and then the thing disappears before Drakken can ask it what in the literal blazes it's doing there.
Not that he wants it back. At all. But, good gravy, why is the only alternative watching slivers of metal rain down from between Blue Diamond's fingers? The sword is no more – she crushed it.
With her bare hands. Without a flinch, despite what that had to have done to her palms. And – oh yes, she also goes ahead and turns her back on the falling Connie.
As if things could possibly get any worse, a lion charges down the beach. He roars (and yes, it is obviously a "he," with a mane to rival Shego's), throwing himself directly under Connie's expected landing site. Drakken is so confused – who brought this lion? – that he forgets to turn away from whatever horrifying thing is surely about to happen.
Connie thumps down hard against the lion's back. And instead of, you know, eating her, the lion trots calmly up to a sand dune, lies down, and allows Connie to climb off his back, just like Commodore Puddles did for Drakken and Shego the day he became Super-Mega-Poodle.
Drakken's memory banks somehow retrieve the image of Steven being followed around by a tame, pink lion, and they sag with relief.
With one smooth gliding motion, Blue Diamond has riveted her eyes to Steven. Drakken has heard of people having "ice-blue eyes" before – mostly in that teen-werewolf-romance genre he perused for a while, trying to get inside the head of his teenaged nemesis – but this is the real deal. Her eyes are frosted over, frozen solid where they should be liquid, right at home on this woman who dribbles metal shards between her fingers like liquid silver.
"How could you do it, Rose?" Blue Diamond demands. "How could you shatter her?"
"Um, actually, I didn't?" Steven says with a nervous giggle. No, "nervous" is too mild a term – the giggle falls down in fragments just the way the sword did. "You see, it's actually kind of a funny story –"
Blue Diamond pulls her hand back in a way that looks awfully familiar. A ball of blue light blooms on her fingertips. Even before Drakken realizes it's Shego the movements remind him of, he's running as fast as his legs can carry him, and he could swear they've shrunken another inch or two since this morning. "Steven!" he calls. "Look –"
The blue orb explodes off Blue Diamond's hand and drives into Steven's stomach so hard that he rockets backward. The fuchsia fusion lunges, flinging out a hand, and Steven bounces into place right atop the greenish-washed gem in its center.
But Blue Diamond has another trick up her sleeve. (Actually, she could be hiding a whole country's worth of artillery up those flowy, overdramatic sleeves of hers, but Drakken digresses.) Her fingers lift to her temples and clutch. The solid mass of grief in her eyes melts and comes coursing down her cheeks.
With a sharp flash of light, the fuchsia fusion disappears, falling into four shadowy figures, though the two littlest never let go of each other's hands and have soon remerged.
Oh, that must be Ruby and Sapphire! is one of two things that go through Drakken's brain. The other doesn't waste any time being converted into words, simply shoots forward a vine, cinches it around Steven's belly, and tugs him backward toward Drakken.
Steven bounces onto his back, and Drakken lays him down gently as he can. When he leans over Steven, the kid's eyes are overflowing with tears.
Drakken's heart hits his rib cage like a battering ram. "Are you hurt?" he bursts out. "Did I – did I hurt you?"
Grabbed him by the stomach. His gem is on his belly button! Oh, dear sweet Mother Curie –
"No. I'm okay." Steven sobs, points at Blue Diamond. "It's just – her."
Drakken checks on Blue Diamond, and nothing about her has changed – still clutching and weeping. Beside him, it's Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl who have changed, collapsing to their knees while tears stream down. It seems as if those tears are being dragged upward from some external source, as fake and tacky as those mustaches he used to draw on Kim Possible's newspaper photographs whenever he got the chance.
Only Drakken, Connie, and Lion appear to be unaffected. Loath as he is to admit it, Drakken knows he is usually one of the first ones in a room to start crying, not one of the last men standing. He is not used to being one of the strong ones, and it would empower him if he weren't so doggone frightened.
Drakken whips a glance back at the porch to confirm his hypothesis. Yes, just as he suspected – Greg's on his feet, but he is the only one. Bismuth, the Gem who left his girlfriend's gem to be affixed to the back of a mirror five thousand years ago, who slandered her just today, is doubled over sobbing, and Drakken can't even be satisfied. Not when he sees Peridot – sweet, precious Peridot on the ground, with her entire left side pressed against the house, her right hand up to claw at her visor, where the tears continue to erupt.
The very air stabs at Drakken again, all the way through this time, somehow without tearing the fabric of his lab coat. Hurts so much.
"Peridot!" Drakken cries.
This time, his volume overcomes the wind. That or Greg Universe has very keen, refined instincts. He bends down, cradles Peridot in his arms, and strokes her triangle of a head.
Only then does Drakken turn back to the rest of the fray.
Garnet is stronger than most in her fusion…ness. She has managed to pry herself from the sand and she pulls herself on her elbows, inch by inch, until she is sprawled at Blue Diamond's feet.
Blue Diamond glances down at her in puzzlement. Contempt. "What are you?" she says.
Whatever Garnet says in reply gets lost amid the roaring in Drakken's eardrums.
"You're them," Blue Diamond says at last. "That Ruby and Sapphire who disrupted my court!"
My court. My court. My court. The syllables land like punches on Drakken and, judging by how Blue Diamond appears to be getting even bigger and closer, they're propelling his legs forward as well. His girlfriend was part of that court!
For the first time since Drakken has known her, Garnet looks frustrated. He is near enough now to hear her mutter, "Ugh! This was supposed to be my day," through the tears. She lifts her arms and curves them around Blue Diamond's ankles, nowhere close to encircling them. Garnet shakes, and Drakken's teeth grind in secondhand strain just watching her.
"You think you can defeat me by clinging to my feet?" Blue Diamond says. The question is rhetorical, Drakken can tell because he's a genius, and it's more hailstorm than thunder, ready to clock Garnet right in the shades.
Yet the tiniest hint of a smile germinates on Garnet's lips. "I'm not defeating you," she says. "I just needed to keep you from taking three steps to your right."
Blue Diamond snaps her gaze upward. So does Drakken. A huge, square shape rests bewilderingly in the sky directly above Blue Diamond's head. Floating several feet above that, a slight, winged silhouette stands midair with arms spread.
For an instant, Drakken is sure it is some sort of guardian angel, on a mission from God Himself to protect the planet. But then the floodlights from the wreckage of the yellow ship catch on the wings and reflect back. The ends are wavy with water, not feathers, and Drakken understands and shrieks out loud.
It's no angel.
It's better – if he's allowed to say that.
It's Lapis.